Ian & Stuart's Australian Mac: Not for Sale/Another.not.for.sale (Australia).iso/Dr. Doyle/Hypertext and Writing/Tree Fiction

Text File | 1994-10-08 | 21KB | 407 lines

                                 TREE FICTION

   Copyright Gareth Rees, September 1994.
    1. Introduction
    2. The exponential problem
    3. Collaboration and coherency
    4. Merging narratives
    5. Conclusion
    6. Feedback
    7. References

Introduction

   There are many ways of structuring hypertext fiction, from the fully
   `interactive fiction' of automated story-generating systems and
   adventure games, to conventional narratives presented as a
   collection of linked hypertext pages (for example, this conversion of
   Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll). Hypertext may be
   used simply to add illustrations and footnotes (see Accounting for the
   Cards by Heather Valimaa); it may be used to present a single
   narrative through different viewpoints, different styles of writing,
   different places and different times; or it may be used to allow the
   reader to access a variety of material in an unstructured way and thus
   construct their own narrative (for example, The Dictionary of the
   Khazars by Milorad Pavic).

   For discussion of possible ways of structuring these kinds of
   interactive fictions, and guidelines for producing good ones, see the
   essays `Structuring Interactive Multimedia Fiction' by Geri Gay,
   `Selfish Interaction or Subversive Texts and the Multiple Novel' by
   Michael Joyce, and Hypertext Presentation by Kurt Revis. For examples
   of hyperfictions, see this list of Hypertext Fiction on the World Wide
   Web.

   This article will discuss some of the problems of writing one kind of
   hypertext fiction, called `tree literature', or `plot branching', or
   `choose your own fiction'. It consists of short sections of
   conventional narrative, each ending with a choice for the reader that
   determines what happens next and thus which section of the narrative
   should be read next. When presented on paper, such a fiction usually
   consists of numbered paragraphs connected by directions, like this:

     8. In bed, they wore blue velvet gloves.
     If you prefer gloves of another colour, go to 7;
     if this colour suits you, go to 10.

   (Raymond Queneau, `A Story as You Like It')

   Exploration of the alternative possibilities inherent in a narrative
   seems such a natural idea that it is surprising that it is a recent
   development in print. The earliest reference I know of is the `tree
   literature' proposed by FranÁois Le Lionnais at the 79th meeting of
   the Oulipo (short for `Ouvroir de LittÈrature Potentielle', a French
   literary society dedicated to experimental writing). The Queneau
   example quoted from above was presented at the 83rd meeting and
   appeared in print in 1967, and the Julio Cortazar novel Hopscotch,
   which used `tree literature' techniques, though sparingly, was
   published in 1966.

   Tree literature reached the masses with the publication of the `choose
   your own adventure' series (beginning in 1981 with The Circus by
   Edward Packard and now numbering more than eighty titles) and the
   `fighting fantasy' series (beginning in 1982 with The Warlock of
   Firetop Mountain by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone). Both series
   are adventure stories for children, almost entirely in the science
   fiction and fantasy genres, and presented as games rather than
   stories, the aim usually being to complete some task specified at the
   start of the book by finding the (often unique) sequence of choices
   that takes you from the start section to the winning section.

The exponential problem

   The Oulipo writers who experimented with tree literature quickly
   realised the limitations of the form. In Paul Fournel's discussion of
   his `combinatory play' The Theatre Tree, he writes:

     At the outset, the objective was to produce a play using the
     structure of the tree. The problems encountered in a project of this
     sort are numerous, and some of them appeared practically insoluble.
     A `tree' play would, more particularly, demand an almost superhuman
     effort of memory on the part of the actors.

   The play has four `binary decision points' (i.e. points at which the
   audience are asked to choose between two alternatives). If all the
   branches were separate, this would have required a total of thirty-one
   scenes; in fact, some of the developments share the same outcome, and
   Fournel wrote only fifteen scenes (including only two endings: one
   happy, the other unhappy).

   Another play that uses the tree structure is Alan Ayckbourn's 1985
   Intimate Exchanges (filmed by Alain Resnais as Smoking and No
   Smoking). This has four binary decision points (respectively five
   seconds, five days, five weeks, and five years after the beginning)
   and the full complement of thirty-one scenes, including sixteen
   endings. It fills two weighty volumes.

   For a third example, see Charles Deemer's work in progess, The
   Cyberspace Sonnets, which has five decision points, each offering
   between two and four choices. If Deemer continues to offer the reader
   as many branches as he has done up until now, the completed collection
   will have over 250 possible sonnets and over 900 lines of iambic
   pentameter (a far cry from the hundred trillion sonnets of Queneau's
   Cent Mille Milliard de PoËmes - but Queneau's sonnets are created by
   selecting randomly from ten possibilities for each line, and mostly
   get their meaning from the interpretation of the reader rather than
   the effort of the author). At the time of writing, Deemer has
   completed about 7% of the work.

   These writers have all come up against the exponential problem, the
   combinatory explosion of the number of endings as the number of choice
   points goes up. With ten binary decision points, there are a thousand
   endings; with twenty, over a million. If we want to offer the reader
   frequent choice, or at least the illusion of frequent choice, how can
   we manage it?

Collaboration and coherency

   One attractive solution to the exponential problem would be to turn a
   tree fiction into a collaborative project. The communication software
   of the World Wide Web makes it technically very easy to make a section
   of a tree fiction available to the world, together with a decision
   point whose options as yet point nowhere, and to provide a mechanism
   for readers to add their own sections to the growing tree if they
   wish. However, a glance at the numbers involved makes it clear that
   asking for help in this way gains very little. If every
   English-speaking person in the world wrote a single section, together
   they could not complete all the branches on a tree with 28 decision
   points (a story in Chinese would get one decision point further). At
   five hundred words a section, each complete narrative would be fifteen
   thousand words - a respectable novelette, but no more. It's clear that
   a fully branching tree novel is beyond all possibility.

   In a sense, writing a tree fiction in this way is like participating
   in a pyramid scheme: you must somehow recruit enough writers to write
   a successor section to each choice your section offered, and they in
   turn must recruit others. The reward is that of seeing your own ideas
   give rise to a multitude of continuations; the cost is that of
   actually writing your section.

   Collaboration causes problems of its own. Writers who participate in
   `shared world' series have long recognised the necessity of tight
   editorial control to avoid a multitude of continuity errors as each
   collaborator makes up their own locations, histories, customs,
   technologies and so on.

   In a tree fiction, the rules can be more relaxed; frame-breaking `what
   if' decisions that in a conventional narrative would disrupt the idea
   of a constant past, here seem quite legitimate: `If Oedipus is
   Jocasta's long-lost son, go to 25; if he really is the child of the
   shepherd, go to 17.' But even given the legitimacy of this kind of
   freedom, unless editorial control is exercised, chaos is sure to
   result. [Note: this example, and those later in the article, are not
   real examples of tree fiction, but have been written to illustrate as
   clearly as possible the nature of the problems discussed here.]

     1. Winston examined the picture. It was a steel engraving of an old
     church.
     If he continues to examine the picture, go to 2; if he goes outside,
     go to 3.

     2. `You are the dead,' said an iron voice. Something crashed onto
     the bed behind Winston's back. The head of a ladder had been thrust
     through the window and had burst in the frame. There was a stampede
     of boots up the stairs. The room was full of solid men in black
     uniforms. . .

     3. His limousine was waiting outside the gallery. `Where to,
     guv'nor?' asked his chauffeur. `The War Office,' growled Winston,
     biting the end off a new cigar, `Enough of art! We have a war to
     win!'. . .

   This example is ridiculous, but something like it would seem to be the
   inevitable outcome of unrestricted contribution. Collaborators will
   not be aware of each others' hidden assumptions and, especially in the
   distributed style of collaboration envisaged by some, may not even
   take the trouble to read all the existing continuations in order to
   make sure that theirs is consistent with what has gone before.

   The continuity mistake illustrated above renders the example, and real
   fictions like it, no more than a joke. A choice is not a choice unless
   there is some permanent background against which to examine it. Even
   when we ask a bizarre `what if' question - for example, `What if
   Leonardo da Vinci had lived in the twentieth century?' - we mean that
   his personality should stand as a constant background against which to
   examine advances in science and changes in society. Similarly, we do
   not expect the question, `What if Winston Smith had escaped from the
   Thought Police?' to be answered by a metamorphosis into Winston
   Churchill, but at least two collaborative tree fiction experiments on
   the World Wide Web (Shu Kuwamoto's Choose Your Own Adventure Story and
   Allen Firstenberg's Addventure) have very much of this incoherent feel
   to them.

Merging narratives

   A second solution to the exponential problem would be to merge the
   continuations, to have several branches leading to the same
   conclusion. Fournel's The Theatre Tree made use of this technique,
   `which gives the audience all the appearances of the tree, but avoids
   the disadvantages for the actors'. The `choose your own adventure'
   books use this technique a lot in order to have hundreds of decision
   points without being overwhelmed by the multiplicity of branches.

   But if two developing branches of a story eventually arrive at the
   same destination, then something must have been lost. One possibility
   is that the choice has no effect, and thus is not really a choice:

     1. [the battlements of Elsinore Castle]
     HAMLET: To be, or not to be, that is the question.
     If Hamlet takes arms against a sea of troubles, go to 3; if he
     shuffles off this mortal coil, go to 2.

     2. [HAMLET goes to throw himself over the battlements, but the GHOST
     suddenly appears in his way]
     GHOST: O horrible! O horrible! most horrible! [exit; enter OPHELIA]
     OPHELIA: Didst not thou love me?
     HAMLET: I loved you not.
     OPHELIA: I was the more deceived.
     Go to 4.

     3. [enter OPHELIA]
     HAMLET: Where's your father?
     OPHELIA: At home, my lord.
     HAMLET: Let the doors be shut upon him, that he may play the fool
     nowhere but in's own home. Farewell.
     OPHELIA: O help him, you sweet heavens.
     HAMLET: If thou dost marry, I'll give thee this plague for thy
     dowry: be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not
     escape calumny.
     Go to 4.

     4. HAMLET: Get thee to a nunnery. . .

   What is the value of Hamlet's decision if it does not affect the
   future? Whatever ironic light this example may cast upon Hamlet's
   predicament, it isn't clear what the point is of writing a story in
   tree form if all the decisions are fake ones that eventually lead to
   the same place in the narrative. An example of this problem is John
   Zakour's hypertext novel The Doomsday Brunette, which uses the merging
   of narratives to keep the story relentlessly on a single track while
   offering the reader an illusion of choice.

   But there is worse: a second possibility is that the choice has a real
   effect all of whose consequences are then lost:

     1. [a blasted heath]
     MACBETH: Speak, if you can: what are you?
     FIRST WITCH: All hail, Macbeth! hail to thee, thane of Glamis!
     If Macbeth and Banquo flee in horror, go to 3; if they stay to
     listen to the witches, go to 2.

     2. SECOND WITCH: All hail, Macbeth, hail to thee, thane of Cawdor!
     THIRD WITCH: All hail, Macbeth, thou shalt be king hereafter!
     [the witches prophesy for Macbeth and Banquo]
     Go to 3.

     3. [the palace at Forres]
     DUNCAN: O worthiest cousin! Would thou hadst less deserved,
     That the proportion both of thanks and payment
     Might have been mine! only I have left to say,
     More is thy due than more than all can pay.
     MACBETH: The service and the loyalty I owe,
     In doing it, pays itself. . .

   In this example, any effect that the witches' prophecy might have had
   upon Macbeth has been lost when the narrative threads merge again.

   Perhaps there is a third possibility, in which the continuation has
   two meanings, one straightforward and one ironic, depending on which
   path was taken. However, I find it hard to see how this could be made
   to work for non-trivial examples.

   The `choose your own adventure' and `fighting fantasy' books use the
   technique of narrative merging, and thus suffer from the problems
   illustrated above. However, the results aren't as bad as the examples
   might suggest. The books in both series tend to have highly motivated
   plots - to escape from somewhere, to rescue someone, to assassinate
   the dark lord, to travel to some distant place - in dangerous
   situations. If the reader diverges too far from the intended plot,
   then they are moved in the correct direction by threats of force or
   appeals to the motivation for the quest.

   These books tend to avoid having to deal with the problem of lost
   consequences by being structured around a fairly linear journey. If
   there is no going back to places previously visited, then there is no
   chance to encounter the consequences of choices. One attempt to allow
   back-tracking (Scorpion Swamp by Steve Jackson) was not very
   successful, and as far as I know, the experiment was not repeated.

   The `fighting fantasy' books attempt in a limited way to explore the
   consequences of earlier choices by requiring readers to keep a list of
   objects encountered along the journey, and then asking questions like
   this:

     278. The dragon attacks you!
     Did you pick up the magic sword? If so, go to 162; otherwise, you
     are fried to a crisp and the story is over.

   Or to prevent easy cheating, like this:

     105. The door is locked.
     Do you have a numbered key? If so, add 29 to the number on the key,
     and go to that section; if not, go to 41.

   The solution to the problem of merging narratives must be to keep
   extra information like this, only in a more sophisticated fashion than
   a list of objects. A tree narrative in which the consequences of early
   decisions can affect later events even though intermediate events have
   been shared between the two paths, is surely possible. Because the
   World Wide Web is stateless (i.e. it only knows where a reader is, and
   not where they have been) it is a difficult - though not by any means
   impossible - problem to implement such a narrative, and perhaps that
   is why it does not seem to have been attempted.

Conclusion

   Stateless tree fiction with more than a half-dozen decision points,
   whether it uses many authors, or the merging of multiple narratives,
   will be no more than a fun experiment (in the former case) or a
   conventional narrative to which the illusion of choice has been added
   (in the latter).

   The addition of state information may allow a writer of tree fiction
   to steer a middle path between the unsatisfactory examples described
   above and the difficult sophistication of computer-generated fiction.
   The stateless nature of the World Wide Web makes it difficult to
   provide such fictions on the Internet, but the problems are not
   insurmountable - interactive games on the Web (such as this Connect 4
   game by Keith Pomakis and Daniel Gordon) store information about the
   state of the board in the URL as a query string. It should be possible
   (though it will require a little more thought) to store information
   relevant to a tree fiction in a similar way.

   I hope that this discussion hasn't been stultifyingly obvious to most
   readers. It seems very clear to me that collaborative tree fiction
   projects like Charles Deemer's Stories from Downtown Anywhere, while
   perhaps being fun for the contributors, are unlikely to produce the
   successful works of fiction, examining the influence of chance and
   choice on peoples' lives, that the form of tree fiction seems to offer
   us. But on the other hand, where are all those people writing stateful
   tree fiction and putting it on the net?

   It's possible that the reason for this non-appearance is that tree
   fiction with more than the very few decision points of the Fournel and
   Ayckbourn plays is unsatisfying and for the foreseeable future will be
   relegated to the status of amusing experiment. Krzysztof Kieslowski's
   1984 tree-structured film Blind Chance spends two hours exploring the
   ramifications of a single decision point, and the resulting mix of
   constancy and variation is very complex. What is then the chance of
   adequately exploring the consequences of even half a dozen decisions?

   I think that as readers we are not ready for tree fiction: I know that
   when I read such a story, I want to find out all the consequences of
   every decision, to read everything that the author wrote, fearing that
   all the interesting development is going on in another branch of the
   story that I didn't investigate. I want to to organise the whole
   structure in my mind. For the kind of tree fiction I am suggesting
   should be written, this would be difficult and fruitless.

   But these are early days for tree fiction on the World Wide Web and I
   am sure that there are better things to come.

Feedback

   Please e-mail any responses and criticisms to me (my e-mail address is
   at the end of this page); I would particularly like to hear about tree
   fictions that aren't described here or in any of the references I
   cite, especially if they take advantage of state in the way I suggest.

References

     * Charles Deemer, What is Hypertext?, 1994.
     * Charles Deemer, The Cyberspace Sonnets, work in progress.
     * Charles Deemer (et al), Stories from Downtown Anywhere, work in
       progress.
     * Allen Firstenberg (et al), Addventure, work in progress.
     * Paul Fournel and Jean-Pierre …nard, `The Theatre Tree: A
       Combinatory Play', reprinted in Oulipo: A Primer of Potential
       Literature, translated and edited by Warren F Motte, University of
       Nebraska Press, 1986.
     * Geri Gay, `Structuring Interactive Multimedia Fiction', in
       Hypertext/Hypermedia Handbook, edited by Emily Berk and Joseph
       Devlin, McGraw-Hill, 1991.
     * Stephen Granade, Interactive Fiction Bibliography, 1994.
     * David Graves, Interactive Fiction FAQ, 1994.
     * Michael Joyce, `Selfish Interaction or Subversive Texts and the
       Multiple Novel', in Hypertext/Hypermedia Handbook, edited by Emily
       Berk and Joseph Devlin, McGraw-Hill, 1991.
     * Shu Kuwamoto (et al), Choose Your Own Adventure Story, work in
       progress.
     * Daniel LaLiberte, World Wide Web Collaboration Projects.
     * Raymond Queneau, Cent Mille Milliard de PoËmes, Paris: Gallimard,
       1962.
     * Raymond Queneau, `Un Conte ‡ Votre FaÁon', in Les Lettres
       Nouvelles, July-September 1967, reprinted as `A Story as You Like
       It' in Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature, translated and
       edited by Warren F Motte, University of Nebraska Press, 1986.
     * Gareth Rees, Review of Blind Chance dir. Kyzysztof Kieslowki,
       1994.
     * Kurt Revis, Hypertext Presentation.
     * Prentice Riddle, Hypertext Fiction on the World Wide Web, 1994.
     * Heather Valimaa, Accounting for the Cards.
     * Alma Whitten and Scott Reilly, The Oz Project.
     * John Zakour, The Doomsday Brunette (demonstration of chapters
       1-3), 1994.
    Gareth Rees / [e-mail]